President Barack Obama was overcome with emotion as he spoke at the funeral of the late Democratic Sen. Daniel Inouye today.

In a touching ceremony, at the Washington National Cathedral, Obama said Inouye showed him 'what might be possible in my own life' and credited him as being his earliest political inspiration.

The President looked moved as he recalled a boyhood memory of watching Inouye during the Watergate hearings.

He said the experience left him with a sense of what serving in government was all about and described Inouye as a man full of 'grace and dignity.'

Tearful: President Barack Obama wipes his eye as he is seated with Vice President Joe Biden, former President Bill Clinton, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid at the funeral service for the late Sen. Daniel Inouye

'Danny Inouye was perhaps my earliest political inspiration,' Obama said from the podium.

Other political leaders hailed Inouye for his career, spirit and selflessness.

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His family and staff looked on as Reid, House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Vice President Joe Biden paid tribute to a man who Biden said made him proud to be called a senator.

Boehner noted that Inouye was Hawaii's first congressman. In his early days in Washington, Inouye's modesty would never have allowed him to think he would walk the halls of the Capitol for the next five decades.

'He couldn't have fathomed all the good that he would do here, helping to build a new state, gaining rights benefits for veterans, supporting agriculture, speaking out against injustice, becoming one of the most revered senators in our history,' Boehner said.

Veteran: Daniel Inouye wears the uniform of the U.S. Army's 442nd Regimental Combat Team, made up almost entirely of Japanese-Americans during World War II

Inouye died on Monday from respiratory
complications. The soft-spoken but powerful Democratic chairman of the
Senate Appropriations Committee was 88.

Before Inouye made his mark as a politician, he did so as a war hero who lost his right arm while leading his platoon into battle on a ridge in Italy.

He eventually was awarded the Medal of Honor, the nation's highest military honor.

Biden recalled how Inouye supported his own first run for the Senate and was one of the first to comfort him and try to raise his spirits when his wife and baby daughter died in an automobile accident shortly after his election.

Biden recalled being moved that a man who had lost his right arm so eagerly embraced life and sought to make others feel better.

'I've never met a man or woman with as much physical and mental courage as Daniel Inouye,' Biden said.

After Inouye became Hawaii's first congressman following statehood in 1959, he won election to the Senate in 1962.

He was the first Japanese-American elected to both the House and Senate and was serving his ninth term in the Senate when he died.

As a legislator, his specialty was steering federal money to his home state to develop the kinds of roads, schools and housing other Americans had on the mainland.

Inouye's body will be escorted Friday to the Washington National Cathedral and will be returned to Hawaii on Saturday.

Inouye, a senator since January 1963,
was currently the longest serving senator and was president pro tempore
of the Senate, third in the line presidential succession. His office
said Monday that he died of respiratory complications at a
Washington-area hospital. He was 88.

Inouye was a World War II hero and Medal of Honor winner who lost an arm to a German hand grenade during a battle in Italy.

Funeral: President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and former US president Bill Clinton watch as the casket bearing Senator Daniel Inouye arrives at the catherdral

Joined in song: President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, former President Bill Clinton, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada stand and sing at the funeral service

He became the first Japanese-American
to serve in Congress, when he was elected to the House in 1959, the
year Hawaii became a state.

He won election to the Senate three
years later and served there longer than anyone in American history
except Robert Byrd of West Virginia, who died in 2010 after 51 years in
the Senate.

Although tremendously popular in his
home state, Inouye actively avoided the national spotlight until he was
thrust into it. He was the keynote speaker at the 1968 Democratic
National Convention, and later reluctantly joined the Senate's select
committee on the Watergate scandal. The panel's investigation led to the
resignation of President Richard Nixon.

Inouye also served as chairman of the
committee that investigated the Iran-Contra arms and money affair,
which rocked Ronald Reagan's presidency.

In 2000, Inouye was one of 22
Asian-American World War II veterans who belatedly received the nation's
top honor for bravery on the battlefield, the Medal of Honor. The
junior senator from Hawaii at the time, Daniel Akaka, had worked for
years to get officials to review records to determine if some soldiers
had been denied the honor because of racial bias.

Eulogy: Obama recalled precious memories of the late Senator Daniel Inouye at the funeral service

Pallbearers: Members of the military carry the casket bearing Senator Daniel Inouye

Inouye's first political campaign in
1954 helped break the Republican Party's political domination of Hawaii.
He was elected to the Territorial House of Representatives, where he
served as majority leader. He became a territorial senator in 1958.

Inouye was serving as Hawaii's first
congressman in 1962, when he ran for the Senate and won 70 percent of
the vote against Republican Benjamin Dillingham II, a member of a
prominent Hawaii family.

In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson
urged Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who had won the Democratic
nomination for president, to select Inouye as his running mate. But
Inouye was not interested.

'He was content in his position as a
U.S. senator representing Hawaii,' Jennifer Sabas, Inouye's Hawaii chief
of staff, said in 2008.

Inouye reluctantly joined the Watergate proceedings at the strong urging of Senate Democratic leader Mike Mansfield.

Dedication: Daniel Inouye loved both his country and his state. He witnessed President Eisenhower admitting Hawaii into the union as the 50th state in August 1959

The panel's investigation of the role
of the Nixon White House in covering up a burglary at Democratic
National Committee headquarters at the Watergate in June 1972 ultimately
prompted the House to initiate impeachment proceedings against Nixon,
who resigned before the issue reached a vote in the House.

After the hearings, Inouye said he
thought the committee's findings 'will have a lasting effect on future
presidents and their advisers.

It will help reform the campaign practices of the nation.'

He achieved celebrity status when he
served as chairman of the congressional panel investigating the
Iran-Contra affair in 1987.

That committee held lengthy hearings
into allegations that top Reagan administration officials had
facilitated the sale of weapons to Iran, in violation of a congressional
arms embargo, in hopes of winning the release of American hostages in
Iran and to raise money to help support anti-communist fighters in
Nicaragua.

'This was not a happy chore, but it had to be done,' Inouye said of the hearings.

The panel sharply criticized Reagan
for what it considered laxity in handling his duties as president. 'We
were fair,' Inouye said. 'Not because we wanted to be fair but because
we had to be fair.'

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Born September 7, 1924, to immigrant
parents in Honolulu, Inouye was 17 and dreaming of becoming a surgeon
when Japanese planes flew over his home to bomb Pearl Harbor on December
7, 1941, changing the course of his life.

In 1943, Inouye volunteered for the
Army and was assigned to the famed Japanese-American 442nd Regimental
Combat Team, which earned the nickname 'Go For Broke' and was one of the
most decorated units of the war.

Inouye rose to the rank of captain and
earned the Distinguished Service Cross and Bronze Star. Many of the 22
veterans who received Medals of Honor in 2000 had been in the 442nd.

On April 21, 1945, he was leading a
charge on a machine gun nest in Italy's Po Valley. He was shot in the
abdomen, but kept inching toward the machine gun and managed to throw
two grenades before his right arm was shattered by a German grenade.
Even then, he continued to direct his platoon

'By his gallant, aggressive tactics
and by his indomitable leadership, Second Lieutenant Inouye enabled his
platoon to advance through formidable resistance,' his Medal of Honor
citation said.

After the war, he returned to Hawaii
and received a bachelor's degree in government and economics from the
University of Hawaii in 1950. He graduated from George Washington
University's law school in 1952.

Honor: Daniel Inouye was the first senator to have lain in the Capitol rotunda since Hubert Humphrey in 1978

Lofty: The view of Senator Daniel Inouye's memorial ceremony from the top of the Capitol

Inouye proposed to Margaret Shinobu Awamura on their second date, and they married in 1949.

Their only child, Daniel Jr., was
born in 1964. When his wife died in 2006, Inouye said, 'It was a most
special blessing to have had Maggie in my life for 58 years.'

He remarried in 2008, to Irene Hirano, a Los Angeles community leader.

Inouye shunned the trappings of
Washington's elite, rising to go to work in a car pool and leaving the
telephone number of his Bethesda, Md., home in the phone book.

He took pride in handling even the smallest requests from his constituents.

He said he once was awakened at 2
a.m. by a telephone call from a Hawaii family asking for help in getting
a soldier home for a family emergency. Inouye said he immediately
called the Pentagon, and 30 minutes later the soldier had his orders to
return home.

'That's a special type of satisfaction that I can enjoy that none of you can,' he said.